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October 12th, 2007Working in IT, staff, clients and even friends seeking free advice seem to labour under the delusion that my brain is a computer. I guess technically it’s sort of an analog one but that’s a stretch at best. So when a non-techie asks me what the speed difference is between USB 1.0, 2.0 and Firewire and I suggest they Google it, I’m usually greeted with looks of amazement as if worms are shooting out of my nose. Little do they realize that Google is my backup brain. Holy crap, my Comcast went down the other week and it was like an instant frontal labotomy.
This article on Wired makes me feel less lonely, yet no less worried.
Holy Paranoia Batman!
August 14th, 2007
I came upon this article after reading about John Young’s Cryptome.org on BoingBoing. My first reaction was that the author needed to take a deep breath, walk over to the bar, pour out a nice glass of single malt, (neat of course), sit down and relax.
By the end I was making a mental list of all the security holes I had that he mentioned! Yikes, I use Linux at home but I think that’s the only thing I have going for me.
Manually install Firefox
August 9th, 2007I recently had an issue w/Ubuntu updating to the latest version of Firefox. For some reason all the releases of Ubuntu I’ve tried (Dapper, Edgy and Feisty) are packaged with Firefox 1.5. I haven’t researched too much into it but I vaguely remember reading something about licensing. Before I upgraded to the latest release, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t have any deprecated versions cluttering my hard drive. So below are instructions on a manual install of Firefox that removes all traces of old versions while retaining the previous versions bookmarks, plugins, etc…
First, go here to get the latest Firefox release.
After downloading, open up your favorite terminal and enter the following 3 commands:
tar -xzvf firefox-CURRENT_VERSION#.tar.gz
sudo mv firefox /usr/local/
sudo ln -s ../firefox/firefox /usr/local/bin/
That’s all folks!
Because /usr/local/bin is before /usr/bin in the default user PATH shell variable you don’t have to modify your default Firefox icon on the Gnome launch toolbar. The default Firefox launching shortcut points to the “firefox” command so it will the “/usr/local/bin/firefox” before the packaged “/usr/bin/firefox” command.
Definitely try Firefoxes’ own update mechanism located under the Help menu first. If that doesn’t work, the above will fix you up.
New elements in HTML 5
August 7th, 2007I’ve been hacking Web code since my freshman year of college and while there have been numerous changes in CSS, JavaScript, PHP; — HTML has remained relatively unchanged since version 4.01. Well this article from the IBM DeveloperWorks site provides some insight into the first HTML code revision since 1999.